Investigating Postdoc Salaries: Purdue University

There is very little information available on how much postdocs are actually paid in the U.S., beyond data on institutional salary policies gathered by the National Postdoctoral Association. Following on from recent discussions about postdoc salaries changing as a result of proposed updates to U.S. Federal labor law, we have gathered data from a selection of institutions through Freedom of Information Requests, asking only for titles and salaries of postdocs, to see if we can identify actual postdoctoral salaries. The aggregate data, and more information, can be found at out “Investigating Postdoc Salaries” Resource. Every day, we will be releasing a discussion of each individual institution or system from which we received data. Today: Purdue University.

Cost for FOIA Request: $0

Additional notes: None.

All postdocs were reported under the title “Post Doc Intern Res”. The number of salaries received expectations from the National Science Foundation data, but one third of the salaries reported were below $23,660 and so excluded from our aggregate dataset. Only 66 salaries out of 407 (those above $23,660) were above the new FLSA minimum.

However Purdue issued a retroactive salary change from January 1st 2017 to $47,500. It will therefore be interesting to see the change this brings to our data collection efforts this year.